a good friend of mine who works as a Marriage and Family Therapist (check out her website… it’s very nice) recently wrote a brief article in our church newsletter entitled “telling secrets.” i’ve asked her permission to share it here… [thx muf]

Telling Secrets.
This is the title to the third book in a trilogy memoir by Frederick Buechner. In his book, Buechner reveals the secret about his father’s suicide and how this affected him as a kid who witnessed it. The main reason why this author shared his memories is to encourage others to look back over their own lives for certain themes and patterns and signals that are so easily missed when we’re caught up in the process of living them. He had hoped that when we listen to our past, we would hear God’s voice. By reading his words, it has triggered reflections about my own family, in particular, secrets in my family.

Every family has secrets. My family is no different. The one secret that I personally don’t think is a well kept “secret” is that my family doesn’t know how to do marriage very well. Out of the five marriages in my family (including my parents), three ended up in divorce, and one is in the midst of separation. Only my marriage with Clark remains standing. Although I believe that Clark and I have a good marriage, it scares me a little to think what could also happen to us. I know that I’m no different than anyone else in my family–that I am susceptible to a failed marriage.

So why am I sharing my family “secret” with the church? I’m not really sure why except to say that I want to hear God’s voice as I listen to my past. Perhaps by sharing this information, it will help me to be honest with God and with others about who I am and what I’m going through in life. My past makes me realize even more my desperate need for God’s grace and mercy in my life, and my need for others to pray for me, my marriage, my kids, and my family. It makes me think about all the marriages and families at our church, and about the single people who may get married one day, and how we need to pray for each other so that we are truly holy or set apart for God in our marriages.

As I try to hear God’s voice through my prayers and reflection about failed marriages in my family, God has re-affirmed how big he is. That he is bigger than me or my life situation, so that I can trust in him and not fear what the future may hold. He has also reminded me of his sense of humour in that he has ironically called me to be a Marriage and Family Therapist, despite my family background. But most of all, he has re-confirmed in me that he is gracious and kind. He probably knew all along that if he didn’t train me as a Marriage and Family Counsellor, that I wouldn’t have a clue how to do marriage in a healthy way; my marriage would be doomed. Perhaps it is through the heartache of divorce that one day my family will also see the need for Christ in their lives, that they too cannot make it on their own.

I’d like to leave us with this last thought from Buechner, from the second book of his trilogy, Now and Then. Hopefully his words will help all of us to listen to our lives a little better, so that we can hear the sound of God’s voice in what has happened to us.

“Because the word that God speaks to us is always an incarnate word—a word spelled out to us not alphabetically, in syllables, but enigmatically, in events, even in the books we read and the movies we see—the chances are we will never get it just right. We are so used to hearing what we want to hear and remain deaf to what it would be well for us to hear that is hard to break the habit. But if we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, if we remember at all deeply and honestly, then I think we come to recognize, beyond all doubt, that, however faintly we may hear him, he is indeed speaking to us, and that, however little we may understand of it, his word to each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling. In that sense autobiography becomes a way of praying….”